People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad

by Philip Gibbs

In countries like England public opinion is still controlled and checked by a system of heavy drag wheels, which is an intolerable nuisance when one wants to get moving. But that system is very useful when there are rocks ahead and the ship of state has to steer a careful course. Our constitutional monarchy, our hereditary chamber composed of men who do not hold their office by popular vote, our traditional and old-fashioned school of diplomacy, our social castes dominated by those on top who are conservative and cautious because of their possessions and privileges, are abominably hindering to ardent souls who want quick progress, but they are also a national safeguard against wild men. The British system of government, and the social structure rising by a series of caste gradations to the topmost ranks, are capable of tremendous reforms and changes being made gradually, and without any violent convulsion or break with tradition.

I am of opinion that this is not so in the United States, owing to the greater pressure of mass emotion. If, owing to the effects of war throughout the world, altering the economic conditions of life and the psychology of peoples, there is a demand for radical alteration in the conditions of labor within the United States, and for a different distribution of wealth (as there is bound to be), it is, in the opinion of many observers, almost certain that these changes will be effected after a period of greater violence in America than in England. The clash between capital and labor, they think, will be more direct and more ruthless in its methods of conflict on both sides. It will not be eased by the numerous differences of social class, shading off one into the other, which one finds in a less democratic country like mine, where the old aristocratic families and the country landowning families, below the aristocracy, are bound up traditionally with the sentiment of the agricultural population, and where the middle classes in the cities are sympathetic on the one hand with the just demands of the wage-earning crowd, and, on the other hand, by snobbishness, by romanticism, by intellectual association, and by financial ambitions with the governing, and moneyed, régime.

There are students of life in the United States who forecast two possible ways of development in the future history of the American people. Neither of them is pleasant to contemplate, and I hope that neither is true, but I think there is a shade of truth in them, and that they are sufficiently possible to be considered seriously as dangers ahead.

The first vision of these minor prophets (and gloomy souls) is a social revolution in the United States on Bolshevik lines, leading through civil strife between the forces of the wage-earning classes and the profit-holding classes to anarchy as fierce, as wild, and as bloody as that in Russia during the Reign of Terror.

They see Fifth Avenue swept by machine-gun fire, and its rich shops sacked, and some of its skyscrapers rising in monstrous bonfires to lick the sky with flames.

They see cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland in the hands of revolutionary committees of workmen after wild scenes of pillage and mob passion.

They see the rich daughters of millionaires stripped of their furs and their pearls and roughly handled by hordes of angry men, hungry after long strikes and lockouts, desperate because of a long and undecided warfare with the strong and organized powers of law and of capital.

Their vision is rather hazy about the outcome of this imaginary civil war, but of its immense, far-reaching anarchy they have no doubt, with the certainty that prophets have until the progress of history proves them to be false.

Let me say for myself that I do not pose as a prophet nor believe this particular prophecy in its lurid details. But I do believe that there may be considerable social strife in the United States for various reasons. One reason which stares one in the face is the immense, flaunting, and dangerous luxury of the wealthy classes in cities like New York. It is provocative and challenging to masses of wage-earners who find prices rising against them quicker than their wages rise, and who wish not only for a greater share of the proceeds of their labor, but also a larger control of the management and machinery of labor. The fight, if it comes, is just as much for control as for profit, and resistance on the part of capital will be fierce and ruthless on that point.